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Oregon still trails the nation in school success

Don’t break into your happy dance just yet. While Oregon’s high school graduation rate did go up last year, it’s still certain to be near the bottom of the national pack.

Moreover, if the current rate of increase is sustained, we won’t reach the laudable 100 percent graduation rate until around 2029, well past the 2025 goal set by former Gov. John Kitzhaber.

Oregon, it seems, still hasn’t found the keys to helping all students get through the most basic education they’ll receive.

The Oregon graduation rate was up by slightly less than 2 percent. Even at that, fewer than 80 percent of youngsters in this state can expect to complete high school within four years of starting it, well below the national average. Thus, in 2014, the last year for which complete numbers are available, 72 percent of Oregon high schoolers graduated on time; nationally the number was 82 percent.

Meanwhile, in Central Oregon, the two smallest school districts, Culver and Sisters, continued to boast the strongest graduation rates, and traditional high schools in most communities also posted above average rates.

It’s no doubt impossible to blame a single thing, or even a handful of single things, for Oregon’s inability to get kids through school on time. We know that up to a point, money plays a role, and that keeping students connected with teachers and with one another helps. And, though the evidence isn’t crystal clear, we suspect that more time in school for all students — more days, more hours — can help.

Too, we know that kids who routinely miss school are less likely to graduate, and Oregon’s children miss lots of school. In fact, youngsters who are not in class at least 90 percent of the time are considered chronically absent. Oregon has an epidemic of chronic absenteeism.

All that suggests that if Gov. Kate Brown’s as-yet-unnamed education innovator does one thing it should be to concentrate on absenteeism. Help Oregon schools keep kids coming day after day, and all the state’s goals should be easier to reach.

— The Bulletin, Bend, Jan. 29

Be careful with marijuana munchies

Regulators with the state of Oregon are proposing a very cautious set of rules to govern what’s certain to be a brisk market in marijuana edibles — cookies, candies, drinks and a surprising variety of other items that can swallowed instead of inhaled.

It’s the right call. Experiences in Colorado and Washington state, two states that legalized the use of recreational marijuana before Oregon, suggest that edibles deserve extra amounts of caution. Oregon is wise to be acting accordingly.

Colorado officials were surprised by the popularity of edibles in that state; one analysis suggests that edibles accounted for roughly a third of recreational marijuana sales there last year. That went hand-in-hand with a surge in the number of calls to poison hotlines and visits to emergency rooms prompted in part by people who had unknowingly ingested considerably more THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, than they had thought.

One of the key issues here involves inexperienced users, who may not understand that one pot-infused marijuana chocolate bar, for example, could contain 10 or so servings — and so it would be a bad idea for one person to swallow the entire bar in one sitting. (It makes matters worse that ingested pot doesn’t take effect as quickly as inhaled pot — and so an impatient inexperienced user might decide to take a second or third helping, with unintended results.)

(Similarly, marijuana smokers who haven’t lit up in years need to remember that today’s marijuana is considerably more potent than it used to be; keep in mind that Colorado slogan, “Start low. Go slow.”)

The Oregon rules about edibles go to lengths to ensure that the products clearly designate how much represents one serving: So, for example, that chocolate bar sold on the recreational market would be made up of 5 milligram servings — and the bar would be clearly marked to designate the size of a single serving. The entire bar could have no more than 50 milligrams of THC — 10 servings in all.

Products where it’s more difficult to identify or designate a single serving size would be limited to a total of 10 milligrams.

The other important issue at stake here is being as sure as possible that edibles don’t fall into the hands of children, who are used to devouring a single candy bar or cookie in one sitting — and who might not be able to read warnings on the packaging (or who may not care). The Oregon rules require that edibles be sold in child-resistant packaging. That packaging cannot feature cartoons or superheroes. State officials also plan to require that marijuana products bear a universal warning sign — a picture of a marijuana leaf next to an exclamation mark.

These restrictions all seem reasonable, especially when you consider that the number of cases reported to the Rocky Mountain Poison Center regarding young children ingesting marijuana increased from five in 2013 to 22 last year, according to a story in The Oregonian newspaper.

Arguments from marijuana proponents that the rules are overly restrictive and could needlessly constrain the state’s growing number of marijuana entrepreneurs just don’t hold much water.

The popularity of edible marijuana products caught Colorado off-guard. In Oregon, we have no such excuse. Shame of us if we can’t learn from the Colorado experience.